John Coltrane was one of the most significant musicians of the 20 th century. His saxophone playing revolutionised jazz music , not twice, not once but 3 times. Today, 35 years after his dying, Coltrane remains more trendy than he was when he was alive. Nearly every modern jazz player has fallen under his spell. Yet his creative spirit reaches outside the sector of jazz. Rock band Audioslave cite Coltrane as a major influence.

Hip hop artists like Mos Def and Talib Kwali, and drum & bass DJs, have borrowed heavily from the Coltrane back catalog. Coltrane's inventive creativeness was largely a product of his very own musical genius, but he was obviously assisted and abetted by a coterie of young musicians. But the Coltrane 'sound ' was also formed conciously and subconsciously by the growing civil rights movement that was sweeping the US in the latter 1950s and 1960s. Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926. By 1943 Coltrane's family found themselves in Philadelphia. Like millions of other black families they'd sought work in the expanding war industries. From the end of the second World War till the early 1970s the US witnessed a sustained industrial boom, which is exemplified in the Hollywood musicals and feelgood films of the 1950s. But US society was also haunted by bigotry. In the South, from the cradle to the grave, black and white people were legally segregated under a system called Jim Crow--it was like apartheid S. A. . This sinister fascism was backed up by organisations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the North states there had been formal equality. But still society was shot through with academic bigotry. In Philadelphia unemployment for black kids aged between sixteen and twenty-eight stayed at seventy % during these boom years. In spite of and infrequently due to their skills, jazz musicians could not escape the indignities of bigotry. Coltrane's best buddy was beaten to death by the police. One of the great free jazz drummers, Sonny Murray, lost his finger in an extremist attack. The poet Langston Hughes summed up the growing bitterness when he wrote : What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sunshine? Or decay like a sore--and then run? Does it reek like rotten beef? Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet? Perhaps it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? And explode it probably did.
On one December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, a black girl, Rosa Parks, declined to give up her seat on a bus to a white lady. Her arrest sparked off the long year Montgomery bus boycott. The protest forced the bus firms to desegregate the buses. The victory sparked off a wave of sit-ins and boycotts apropos segregation all across the country. Martin Luther King led that movement. Impact The civil rights movement had a huge impact on jazz. But first, few general points about the link between mass movements and art. Because art or music is political it does not always make it good.

Art should be adjudicate on its own terms-does it move us, make us think? The music critic and writer Leroi Jones mentioned 'The most expressive black music of any specific period will portray black folk at that specific time. ' Who could reject that hiphop is a reflection of ghetto life in the States? There's not a crude relationship between art and mass movements. For instance, the perspective, the dress and the musical kind of bebop artists like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Friar predated the civil rights struggles by at least twelve years, while the Specials song 'Ghost City ' was of the moment--it encompassed the despair of unemployment as riots rocked our inner towns in 1980. Today, regardless of the big anti-war and anti-capitalist movements, no such radical change in musical styles has happened. The mid-1950s saw a new college of jazz called hard bop, sometimes called soul jazz and cool jazz. Hard bop attempted to respire new life into the music. It drew its musical influences from gospel and the blues, and revived the art of improvisation. Song titles displayed a growing sense of black pride. Here are just few-Sonny Rollins's 'Airegin ' ( Nigeria spelt backwards ) and Max Roach's 'It's Time ' ( short for 'It's time for liberation' ). This music was proud to be black and obviously electrified by the civil rights movement, but its message was codified. But there were artists as Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Sonny Rollins who overtly supported the movements. Coltrane's enormous break came in 1955, when Miles Davis asked him to play in his Quintet. Over the following 4 years the music the band made was some of the best hard bop jazz ever recorded, and can be heard on albums like Workin ', Steamin ' and Cookin '.